My clan spent Memorial Day morning mucking around in a strawberry patch at a sweet little local farm. It rained the night before, and it felt earthy and real for us to get a little mud stained while harvesting our sweet strawberries.

In the warm weather months, I’m always keen to expose my littles to the realities of where our food comes from, and we regularly visit a rotation of local family-owned farms where hard work is a way of life. I want my kids to understand that many hands and sweaty brows go into delivering our food to the grocery store, and that strawberries don’t come from a plastic container. So we go picking. We get our hands dirty, and we appreciate our food a little more when we eat it.

This is a simple cobbler recipe, and it’s perfect for using up a bounty of berries before they go bad. You can add vanilla extract or cinnamon to it to zhush it up if you wish, but I like this version’s pure simplicity. Making cobbler is less labor intensive than crafting a whole strawberry pie. There is no crust to fuss with; just throw it all together and pop it in the oven. It’s my kind of baking.

You’ll need three cups of fresh strawberries.

My helpers cut up the berries.

Pour your cut berries into a bowl.

Grab your sugar canister. (Licking one finger and sticking it into the sugar bowl is sort of a tradition in our house. My sugar canister may or may not contain the germs of two little boys and one little girl. Accept a spoonful of sugar from me at your own risk.)

Measure one-half cup of sugar, pour it in with the berries, and stir to coat them well.

Set aside the strawberries.

Now you need one cup of all purpose flour.

Pour the flour into a new mixing bowl. Measure two teaspoons of baking powder, one-half teaspoon of salt, and one-half cup of sugar, and mix them in with the flour.

Next measure one cup of whole milk,

and grab one stick of butter.

(That’s our dear old pup Lexis. At almost thirteen-years-old, she was our first baby.)

Melt the butter,

and stir the milk and melted butter in with the dry ingredients.

My two youngest confirmed that the ingredients were well combined.

Grease a medium-sized baking dish (I used butter), and pour in the batter.

Spoon the strawberries on top of the batter,

and pop it into a 375 degree oven for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the crust is nice and golden.

Serve warm with vanilla bean ice cream. What a perfect start to summer.